Infinity's Shore

  To open . . . turn knob.

  Dwer's luck held. It rotated.

  If there's air inside, the wind will blow out. If there's none, I'll be blown in . . . and die.

  He had to brace his feet against the hull and pull in order to get the hatch moving. Vision narrowed to a tunnel and Dwer knew he was just duras away from blacking out. . . .

  A sudden breeze rushed at him, whistling with force from the ship's interior. !

  Stale air. Stinky, stale, dank, wonderful air.

  Gillian

  I have read in Earth lore about cetaceans and their glorious Whale Dream. What music might we make, when these strange beings add their voices to our chorus?

  And after that, who knew? Lorniks, chimps, and zookirs? The Kiqui creatures the dolphins brought from far away? A melange of vocalizations, then. Perhaps a civilization worthy of the name.

  All that lay ahead, a glimmering possibility, defying all likelihood or reason. For now, the council was made of those who had earned their place by surviving on Jijo. Partaking of the world. Raising offspring whose atoms all came from the renewing crust of their mother planet. This trait pervaded the musical harmony of the Eight.

  We inhale Jijo, with each and every breath.

  So Phwhoon-dau umbled in the deep, rolling vibrations of his throat sac.

  We drink her waters. At death, our loved ones put us into her abyss. There we join the patterned rhythms of the world:

  THE BAD NEWS WAS NOT EXACTLY UNANTICIPATED, Still, she had hoped for better.

  As the Jophur ship finished adding another swarm of decoys to its prison chain, the cruiser shifted its attention elsewhere, accelerating to pursue the next chosen group,

  Soon the truth became clear.

  Streaker's luck had just run out.

  Well, they chose right this time, she thought. It had to happen, sooner or later.

  Streaker was square in the enemy's sights, with seven mictaars of hyperspace yet to cross before reaching safety.

  The Sages

  THERE ARE OTHERS ON JIJO NOW, PHWHOON-DAU thought, knowing that even eight would not be enough for long. In time, the new dolphin colonists must be invited to join.

  The presence that joined them was at once both familiar and awesome. The council felt it throb in each note of the flute or myriiton. It permeated the clatter of the glaver's rattle, and the wry empathy glyphs of the tytlal.

  For generations, their dreams had been brushed by the Egg. Its soft cadences repaid each pilgrimage, helping to unite the Commons.

  But during all those years, the sages had known. It only sleeps. We do not know what will happen when it wakes.

  Was the Egg only rousing now because the council finally had its missing parts? Or had the cruel Jophur ray shaken it from slumber?

  Phwhoon-dau liked to think that his old friend Vubben was responsible.

  Or else, perhaps, it was simply time.

  The echoes steadily increased. Phwhoon-dau felt them with his feet, reverberating beneath the surface, building to a crescendo. An accretion of pent-up power. Of purpose.

  Such energy. What will happen when it is liberated? His sac pulsed with umbles, painful and mightier than he ever produced before.

  Phwhoon-dau envisioned the mountain caldera blowing up with titanic force, spilling lava down the tortured aisles of Festival Glade.

  As it turned out, the release came with nothing more physical than a slight trembling of the ground.

  And yet they all staggered when it flew forth, racing faster than the speed of thought.

  The Slope

  TO NELO-STANDING IN THE RUINS OF HIS PAPER mill, exhausted and discouraged after a long homeward slog-it came as a rapid series of aromas.

  The sweet-sour odor of pulped cloth, steaming as it poured across the drying screens.

  The hot-vital skin smell of his late wife, whenever her attention turned his way after a long day spent pouring herself into their peculiar children.

  The smell of Sara's hair, when she was three years old . . . addictive as any drug.

  Nelo sat down hard on a shattered wall remnant, and though the feelings passed through him for less than a kidura, something shattered within as he broke down and wept.

  "My children . . ." Nelo moaned. "Where are they?"

  Something told him they were no longer of his world.

  To Fallen-staked down and spread-eagled in an underground roul shambler's lair, waiting for death-the sensation arrived as a wave of images. Memories, yanked back whole.

  The mysterious spike trees of the Sunrise Plain, farther east than anyone had traveled in a century.

  Ice floes of the northwest, great floating mountains with snowy towers, sculpted by the wind.

  The shimmering, teasing phantasms of the Spectral Flow . . . and the oasis of Xi, where the gentle Illias had invited him to live out his days, sharing their secrets and their noble horses.

  Fallen did not cry out. He knew Dedinger and his fanatics were listening, just beyond this cave in the dunes. When the beast returned home, they would get no satisfaction from the former chief scout of the Commons.

  Still, the flood of memory affected him. Fallen shed a single tear of gratitude.

  A life is made whole only in its own eyes. Fallen looked back on his, and called it good.

  To Uriel-interrupted in a flurry of new projects-the passing wave barged through as an unwelcome interruption. A waste of valuable time. Especially when all her apprentices laid down their tools and stared into space, uttering low, reverent moans, or sighs, or whinnies.

  Uriel knew it for what it was. A blessing. To which she had a simple reply.

  So what?

  She just had too much on her mind to squander duras on things that were out of her control.

  In GalTwo she commented, dryly.

  "Glad I am, that you have finally decided. Pleased that you, O long-lived Egg, have deigned to act, at last. But forgive me if I do not pause long to exult. For many of us, life is far too short."

  To Ewasx-moments later and half a light-year away-it came as a brief, agonizing vibration in the wax. Ancient wax, accumulated over many jaduras by the predecessor stack-an old traeki sage.

  Involuntary steam welled up the shared core of the stack, bypassing the master ring to waft as a compact cloud from the topmost opening.

  Praised be destiny. . . .

  Other ring stacks drew away from Ewasx, unnerved by the singular aromatics, accented with savage traces of Jijoan soil.

  But the senior Jophur Priest-Stack responded automatically to the reverent smoke, bowing and adding:

  Amen ...

  even had to quash an urge to go chasing after the damned stone!

  Leave it, and good riddance, he thought, and nodded to Ling.

  "Right, let's go."

  Dwer

  LARK, YOUR HAND!"

  He trembled, fighting to control the fit that came suddenly, causing him to snatch the amulet from around his neck. He clutched the stone tight, even when it began to burn his flesh.

  Crouched behind a set of strange obelisks-their only shelter in the spacious Jophur control room-Lark dared not cry out from pain. He fought not to thrash about as Ling used both hands to pry at his clenched fist. At last, the stone sliver fell free, tumbling across his lap to the floor, leaving a stench of singed flesh. Even now, the heat kept building. They tried backing away, but the stone's temperature continued rising until a fierce glow made it hard to see.

  "No!" Lark whispered harshly as Ling dived toward the blaze, reaching for the thong. To his surprise, enough was still attached for her to grab a loop and whirl it once, then twice around her head, as if slinging a piece of flaming sun.

  She let go, hurling Lark's talisman in an arc across the busy chamber, toward the center of the room.

  Dismayed whistles ensued, accompanied by waves of aromatic stench so overpowering, Lark almost gagged.

  "Why the hell did you-" he began, but Ling tugged his arm.

&nb
sp; "We need a distraction. Come on, now's our chance!"

  Lark blinked, amazed by the power of habit. He was actually angry at her for throwing away his amulet, and

  INSIDE THE DECOY SHIP, HE COLLAPSED ON THE deck and retched, heaving up what little remained in his stomach.

  Midway through that unpleasant experience, another, completely different kind of disorientation abruptly swept over Dwer. For a moment, it seemed as if One-of-a-Kind were inside his head, trying to speak again. The strange, heady sensation might have been almost affable, if his body weren't racked with nausea.

  It ended before he had a chance to appraise what was happening. Anyway, by then he figured he had wasted enough time.

  The Jophur won't take long picking through my little urrish balloon. They'll start on this bubble next.

  In full gravity, it might have been impossible to climb along the full length of the captured ship and reach the aft end. But Dwer took advantage of conditions as he found them, and soon taught himself to fly.

  THEY WERE DASHING DOWN A SMOKE-FILLED HALL|way, chased by angry shouts and occasional bolts of I shimmering lightning, when an abrupt detonation rocked the floor plates. A wall of air struck the two humans from behind, knocking them off their feet.

  We've had it, he thought, figuring it must be a weapon, used by the pursuers.

  Glancing over his shoulder, however, Lark saw the robots suddenly turn and head the other way! Into a noisome storm of roiling black soot pouring out of the control room.

  "Do you think . . . ?" he began.

  Ling shook her head. "Jophur are tough. I doubt they were more than knocked around by the explosion."

  Well, he thought. It was only a little piece of rock.

  He felt its absence acutely.

  Lark helped her up, still wary of returning robots.

  "I guess now they know we're here."

  They resumed running. But a few duras later, Ling burst out in laughing agreement.

  "Yeah, I guess now they do."

  Gillian

  RPSI-DISTURBANCE WAS DETECTED, EMANATING briefly from the planet. Soon after that, the detection officer announced a change on the tactics screen.

  "Will you looka that-t!"

  Gillian saw it. The Jophur configuration was shifting. The bright red disk seemed to shimmer for a moment. Its "tail" of tiny crimson pinpoints, which had been bunching ever closer to the mother ship, now flexed and began to float away.

  "It appears the enemy has jettisoned all the decoys they captured. I can only conclude that they figured out bow to scan them quickly and eliminate dross ships from consideration. The decoys will now drift independently toward Izmunuti, while the battleship, free of drag, will catch up with us much faster."

  Gillian's hopes, which had lifted when the psi-wave came, now sank lower than ever.

  "We'd better get ready for our last stand," she said in a low voice.

  From the dolphins there was an utter absence of sonar clicks, as if none of them wanted to reify the moment, to make it real by reading it in sound.

  "Wait-t a minute," Kaa announced. "The Jophur's decelerating! Coming about to retrieve the jettisoned string!"

  "But . . ." Gillian blinked. "Could they have dropped it by accident?"

  The Niss hologram whirled, then accepted the possibility with an abstract nod.

  "A hypothesis presents itself. The psi-wave we detected was far too weak to have any effect on a war cruiser . . . unless it was direct-causative."

  "Explain." "It might have served as a trigger that-either by accident or design-precipitated the release of potentialities already in place . . . say, aboard the Jophur ship."

  "In other words, the wave might have affected them after all. Maybe it set off events that disrupted-"

  "Indeed. If this caused the Jophur to lose their control over their string of capture boxes, they would certainly go back and retrieve them, even at the cost of some delay. Because they would suspect the string's release was the intended purpose of the psi-wave."

  "In other words, they'll be even more eager to check every box. Hmm."

  Gillian pondered, then asked:

  "Has their intercept time been delayed much?"

  Kaa thrashed his flukes.

  "A fair amount. Not-t enough, however. We'll make it to the Izmunuti corona, but the enemy will be close enough to follow easily with detectorsss. The plasma won't make any a-ppreciable difference."

  Gillian nodded. "Well, things are a little better. And a trick or two to make the odds better still."

  The dolphins snickered knowingly and went back to work, emanating confident clicks. Gillian's last remark was exactly the sort of thing Tom would have said in a situation like this.

  In fact, though, Gillian did not know if her scheme was even worthy of the name.

  sara

  THEY SAID THAT A PSI-WAVE HAD COME FROM JIJO, but Sara didn't feel a thing.

  Not surprising. Of Melina's three children, it always seemed that Dwer had some fey sensitivity, while she, the logical one, possessed none. Till recently, Sara had little interest in such matters.

  But then she wondered. Might this be what Purofsky said we should, look out for?

  Sitting at the stateroom's worktable, Sara addressed the portable computer.

  "About that psi-wave-do we have a fix on its hypervelocity?"

  "Only a rough estimate. It traveled at approximately two mictaars per midura."

  Sara tried to work out the timing in her head, translating it in terms she knew better, such as light-years. Then she realized the machine could do it for her graphically.

  "Show me."

  A holo took shape, portraying her homeworld as a blue dot in the lower left quadrant. Streakerwas a yellow glimmer to the upper right, accompanied by other members of decoy swarm number two. Meanwhile a crimson convoy- the Jophur ship and its reclaimed captives-resumed hot pursuit.

  The computer put down an overlay, depicting a crosshatching of lines that Sara knew to be wave vectors in level-zero hyperspace. The math was simple enough, but it took her some time to figure out the rich, three-dimensional representation. Then she whistled.

  "That's not inverse square. It's not even one-over-R. It was directional!"

  "A well-conserved, directional wave packet, resonating on the first, third^ and eighth bands of-"

  The computer lapsed into psi-jargon that Sara could not follow. For her, it was enough to see that the packet was aimed. Its peak had passed right over both Streaker and its pursuer.

  The coincidence beggared belief. It meant that some great power on Jijo had known precisely where both ships were, and-

  Sara stopped herself.

  Don't leap to the first conclusion that comes to mind. What if we weren 't the beam's objective at all?

  What if we just happened to be along its path, between Jijo and . . .

  She leaped to her feet.

  "Show me Izmunuti and the transfer point!"

  The display changed scale, expanding until Streaker-was shown just over halfway to the supposed safety of the fiery red giant.

  And beyond it, a folded place. A twist in reality's fabric. A spot where you go, if you want to suddenly be very far away. '

  Although computer graphics were needed to make it out clearly, the transfer point was no invisible nonentity. Izmunuti bulged in its direction, sending ocher streamers toward the dimple in space.

  "When will the psi-wave reach Izmunuti?"

  "It has already arrived."

  Sara swallowed hard.

  "Then show me estimated ..." She dredged memory for words she had read, but seldom used. "Show me likely hyperdeflection curves, as the psi-wave hits the red giant. Emphasize meta-stable regions of ... um, inverted energy storage, with potential for . . . uh, stimulated emission on those bands you were talking about."

  Sara's face flickered as manicolored lines and curves reflected off her forehead and cheekbones.

  Her eyes widened, briefly showing white all the
way around the irises. She mouthed a single word, without managing to form a voice.

  Then Sara clutched for a nearby pad of paper-no better than the premium stock her own father produced-and scrawled down two lines of coordinates.